Snippets
by Antiquixotic
Summary: A selection of self-contained ficlets, primarily featuring House and Wilson. Drama! Action! Gratuitous snark!
1. Mugging

_I write drabbles from time to time, and I figured it would be good to put them all in one place. :-)_

_This particular ficlet was written in response to a challenge in the Sick!Wilson LJ. The word: Mugging._

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><p>"Hold still, you big baby," House grumbled, grabbing Wilson's chin when the man flinched away. Digging his fingers into his friend's jaw to hold him steady, he ran a swab over the long, thin wound that bisected a bushy eyebrow and curved perilously close to the lacrimal gland above Wilson's right eye.<p>

"My apologies," Wilson said somewhat breathlessly, his eyes stinging from the alcohol fumes. House felt a private relief when the involuntary tears welling up in the wounded eye ran clear, with no sign of bloody discharge. "It's just hard to be calm when some jackass is jabbing his fingers into the _gaping wound in my face._"

House proved him a liar when he snorted and dropped the swab, releasing Wilson's chin to hold the wound closed with a light, professional touch. "Don't exaggerate. This is barely a dehisce. A yawn at the most."

"Thank you, Dr. Thesaurus," he said wryly, while his shaking hands clenched unseen in his lap. As House frowned hard at the offending injury and began to apply a neat row of steri-strips, Wilson grinned with calculated ease, careful not to move a muscle north of his upper lip. "Next time, I'll ask the guy with the switchblade to show a little more enthusiasm."

"_Next time, _just give him the damn wallet," came the ready response; flat and acidic. "If you get yourself killed, I'll have to start filching Cuddy's lunch instead. And despite what that magnificent ass of hers implies, the woman lives on nothing but salad."

A rebuff sprang readily to his lips, but a certain tightness around House's eyes made the instinctive flippancy die away. At long last, the churning in his gut settled, and Wilson felt steady once again as he wrapped a hand around House's wrist, two fingers pressing reassuringly against his friend's pulse-point before dropping away. It was an apology without words, and when House grabbed a cherry sucker from a nearby jar and chucked it at his head a moment later, Wilson knew it'd been accepted.


	2. Roar

_This particular drabble was written in response to a challenge in the Sick!Wilson LJ. The word: Roar._

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><p>Fresh wounds opened up across his fingers, his hands, his wrists as he tore at the concrete slab, fingerpainting bright streaks of red in the gravel dust. He ignored the roaring in his ears as the shattered building around them settled yet again, tighter and closer still, like the closing of a mouth.<p>

"Get out," said the man half buried beneath the slab, his voice as shattered as his body. "I'm done."

Teeth bared in defiance, he wedged his fingers between the man's body and the rock. "Shut up, Wilson," he growled thinly, and began to heave.


	3. Down

_This ficlet was written in response to an angst drabble challenge on the House-Wilson LJ._

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><p>It was later, and he was sitting in a dim apartment with the shadow of a piano draped over his legs. A drink was in one hand, sucked down to the dregs, and the other cradled a half-empty bottle of bourbon. His head was spinning in slow revolutions, and he knew that a wise person would stop now.<p>

A wise person. Nothing like House, who had jumped into the deep end of life and damned the consequences, who had flirted with mortality so well and for so long that death, finally, had to take him sleeping.

A wise person would live quietly for another thirty years, each day passing without the face and scent and presence of the man he had loved beyond reason.

Wilson nodded once in the darkness, filled his glass to the brim, and drank it all down.


	4. Knowing

_This ficlet was written in response to a smut drabble challenge on the House-Wilson LJ._

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><p>The hands that touched him were tender, and they stilled the trembling in his body with slow sweeps of those long fingers. They opened him up and played him like an instrument, like music, like something precious, and it was that more than anything that made him surrender. A narrow mouth swallowed his moan at the first plunge, and when warmth pooled at the base of his spine, he swung a leg over those hips and arched helplessly up.<p>

This was the knowledge Wilson would carry with him: The first time he flew apart beneath a man, House was kind.


	5. Haikus

_Four scribblings for the House-Wilson Haiku Challenge on LJ. _

_Thanks so much, everyone, for your very kind reviews! They are most appreciated. :-)_

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><p>Waking without him<p>

feels a bit like dying, or

falling down real far.

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><p>Vomit on the floor<p>

Blue eyes glazed from stolen pills.

He cannot forget.

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><p>There were few he loved<p>

and many more he hated.

James defies typecast.

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><p>Pianist fingers<p>

Calluses from guitar strings.

An offbeat allure.


End file.
